‘ In the beauty salon, I can forget the past’
The seven-year Syrian war has not only deprived women of their homes, but also the opportunity to feel beautiful. Now, a salon is offering them that chance. Lizzie Porter reports…
With deft hand gestures,
Madina Hassan separates Gulistan’s long chestnut hair into strips and folds them into a topknot. She blow-dries, tongs and pins as the 16-year-old Syrian sits patiently. They are in a salon with a mirror, dressing table, sink and bottles of hairspray and water spritzers lining the shelves. In many respects, it’s your average beauty therapist’s parlour. But the location is less than average.
It is housed in a prefabricated building at Domiz 1 refugee camp in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, and is a welcome distraction in lives that have been characterised by violence and poverty.
For the millions forced to flee their country, they have had little time for themselves while concentrating on keeping their families alive. But here, focusing on wellness is starting to make women feel human again.
They learn beauty therapy skills and practise hairstyles and make-up tricks on each other. Madina, 33, has learned how to do a number of hairstyles during a fiveweek beauty therapy course at the centre, which is run by non-profit organisation International Medical Corps. Now, she has even offered her skills to brides in the camp who are preparing for their weddings.
‘ You need to see the good parts of our lives,’ Madina says. ‘I feel happy when I show you my work.’ There are many painful parts to Madina’s past. In 2012, with her husband Ibrahim and three-year-old daughter Fatima, she fled her newly bought home in Damascus, the Syrian capital, as the then year-long violence in the country worsened.
Now a mother of three (Madina was pregnant with her second daughter, Asinat, as the family made the 1,000km journey to the relative safety of northern Iraq), she says she can still hear the shooting sounds that surrounded her as they fled. ‘ We were so scared. I really thought we would die.’
They swapped their Damascus home for Domiz 1, where 27,000 displaced people – mostly other Syrians – live, becoming some of the 240,000 Syrian refugees in Iraq, among some 5.3 million displaced in Middle Eastern countries overall.
Gulistan – now resplendent with the beehive hairstyle that Madina has delicately created and a full face of make-up – also came to the camp in 2012, after her brother was arrested three times by the Syrian regime and her family had to flee.
‘In the salon, I can forget the past,’ she says as she snaps a selfie on her phone. ‘ The beehive hairstyle is my favourite. I feel more confident in myself since I have been coming here. I have realised my right to learn skills – although I still don’t think I have a future in Iraq,’ she adds, dejectedly.
Still, for Gulistan, the camp salon is a safe space. Her mother, Seyveh, says that men have been proposing to her daughter since she was 14. ‘She is a girl, just a child, and [ by coming to the beauty salon] she is deciding to continue learning,’ Seyveh explains.
As well as offering training, the salon encourages women and girls to spend time on themselves. Often – though not in the case of Gulistan or Madina – they attend the beauty courses despite protests from their husbands, who frown on women building skills for themselves, or even leaving their homes.
It has become a place of comfort and safety for the women who have suffered harrowing tragedies, but it is not a replacement for their old lives. ‘I’ve learned new skills here, but what I have is not like what I had in Syria – a big and comfortable house,’ admits Madina. ‘I want to go abroad and have a salon and work for myself one day. Mainly, I want my children to be safe.’
since coming to the salon, i have realised my right to learn skills